Cruising With Ruben & The Jets

The fictitious bio about Ruben Sano next to Frank’s high-school photo on the back cover ends with the fan-club-spoofing fact that the singer “has 3 dogs. Benny, Baby & Martha.” If we return to the back cover of Absolutely Free, we find a wall of graffiti that reads “Benny, Joe, Ruben, Mar[tha], Steve” under an advertisement for Fydo dog collars.
     The poodle, a frequent Zappa symbol of the unnatural, repressive shaping of a media-influenced person, appears as Fido the talking dog in “Stink-Foot” on Apostrophe (‘), Fido the sex-starved monster in “Cheepnis” on Roxy & Elsewhere and Evelyn the modified (clipped and sculpted) dog listening to the Lumpy Gravy piano-dwellers on One Size Fits All. On the front cover of the latter, God’s hand is tattooed with the Pachuco cross (the Californian Spanish gangster emblem from Frank’s teenage memories), which is also found in the Absolutely Free graffiti. The “God/dog” blasphemy comes into play, implying in this context that religion’s just another media tool that collars the unwary, when God’s hand is seen in the One Size Fits All picture and when one considers the title “Dog Breath, in the Year of the Plague” from Uncle Meat; plagues were among the historical events in Christian history, and the character in the song sings like a Pachuco (“mi carrucha,” etc.). God’s sofa is seen on the One Size Fits All cover as well; the Hebrew term En Sof means “the Boundless One.”

A small word balloon on Ruben’s front cover, far off to the left, has one of the musicians (whose noses are extended like dogs’ in order to fit their enlarged brains, as the Uncle Meat booklet explains) going “quackquack,” spoofing people who try to be cool at the expense of being themselves (acting like a duck rather than a dog). In this case, the quacking singer’s trying to sound black; it’s Frank’s self-effacing joke about being a white person who tries to sing the blues. Duck bills resemble black people’s lips, as the Thing-Fish album points out via its sarcasm-based mockery of those who stereotype.
     In the army to the left on the Grand Wazoo cover, we see not a singing dog breaking character, but a quacking horse riding into battle (horses have big lips). A similar horse is seen on the back wall in the Ahead of Their Time drawing, also quacking. On the floor is a book called Uncle Duck, under the only non-dog character in the drawing: a bird. The French word oiseau (say “wazoo”) means “bird.”